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GOES-14 is in Super Rapid Scan Mode

By Scott Lindstrom •

GOES-14 0.62 µm Visible Imagery, 18 April 2016 [click to play animation]

GOES-14 0.62 µm Visible Imagery, 18 April 2016 [click to play animation]

GOES-14 has entered super  rapid scan operations that will continue through 15 May 2016 (Link), in part to support the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) at the Storm Prediction Center (GOES-R HWT Blog) and the VORTEX Southeast experiment. GOES-14 is viewing the central Plains today and tomorrow in anticipation of thunderstorm development. (SPC Day 1 Convective Outlook for 18 April; Day 2 Convective Outlook for 19 April). The visible animation above shows a strong thunderstorm early in the morning on 18 April 2016 near Kerrville TX.

Note that the Twitter Feed @SRSORbot is now active. The bot tweets out 1-hour animations (with 5-minute time steps) every 20 minutes using the latest GOES-14 SRSO-R visible (day) or infrared (night) imagery.

A longer version of the GOES-14 Visible image animation (with overlays of surface weather symbols) is shown below (also available as a large 203 Mbyte animated GIF).

GOES-14 Visible (0.63 µm) images, with plots of surface weather symbols [click to play MP4 animation]

GOES-14 Visible (0.63 µm) images, with plots of surface weather symbols [click to play MP4 animation]

A comparison of GOES-15, GOES-14 and GOES-13 Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images, below, demonstrates the advantage of 1-minute super rapid scan over the routine 15-minute routine scan interval for characterizing the intensity and trends of a short-lived grassfire in far western Oklahoma. Even though a fire hot spot (yellow color enhancement) appeared on the “2000 UTC” GOES-15 and GOES-13 images, the actual scan time of the fire for those 2 satellites was 2004 and 2003 UTC, respectively; a fire hot spot of 317.2 K was first detected on the 2101 UTC GOES-14 image. The magnitude of the fire hot spot then quickly increased to 332.8 K (red color enhancement) on the 2005 UTC GOES-14 image; the short-term fluctuations in the intensity of the fire hot spot were only adequately captured by the 1-minute super rapid scan interval of the GOES-14 images.

GOES-15 (left), GOES-14 (center) and GOES-13 (right Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images [click to play animation]

GOES-15 (left), GOES-14 (center) and GOES-13 (right Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images [click to play animation]

Categories: Fire detection, GOES-14, Severe convection